Articles Tagged “Israel ”

I remember the first time I came across Etgar Keret, and that I threw the book across the room. I had been beat to the punch. This marvel, this oracle, this as we say in Yiddish, this “meshuga” mind had figured out how to hybrid what felt to me a mix of Irvine Welsh, Amy Hempel, Kafka,…...read more »

In conjunction with our live Etgar Keret discussion on March 5th at the Idlewild bookstore in New York, Adam Rovner, writer, scholar and translations editor of Zeek, will be moderating an online discussion on Etgar Keret's Girl on the Fridge. Adam will be posting weekly about reading The Girl on…...read more »

In his first blog post for our online book club on Etgar Keret's Girl on the Fridge, Adam Rovner discusses the hyper-real in Keret's story "The Night the Buses Died." We hope you'll read this and the other essays in the series and join in with your comments.—Editors Keret's "The…...read more »

Last Thursday's Keret event at Idlewild was a hoot. Miriam Shlesinger's discussion about translating Keret's use of slang, though she is over twenty years his senior, (Keret is 42), was hilarious. "I cannot tell you how long I spent trying to decide between the word “chicks” versus…...read more »

Here's part one of a video with Miriam Schlesinger and Philip Lopate discussing Etgar Keret as part of our Conversations on Great Contemporary Literature Series. Links to other posts in our Girl on the Fridge discussion: Keret events this March in Boston and Chicago. Adam Rovner puts Etgar Keret…...read more »

At nearly nine pages, "An Exclusive" is the lengthiest story in Etgar Keret's Girl on the Fridge. Perhaps because it's the longest, it's one of my favorites. Keret is known as a stylist of economy, of idiom, and of the manipulation of powerful cultural allusion. "An Exclusive" demonstrates…...read more »

When I saw Etgar Keret at the PEN World Voices Festival last year I was disappointed because he chose to read “Hat Trick,” a story that is as unsettling in its implications as it is gruesome. The reason for my dismay, besides the squirminess that story makes me feel, was that the brutality…...read more »

"Hat Trick" first appeared in Missing Kissinger (1994), and has since proved one of Etgar Keret's most popular stories. In 1998, artist Batia Kolton of the Actus Tragicus comics collective adapted the story into a graphic and disturbing tale. You can find it in English as "HaTrick" in Jetlag: Five…...read more »

The two Israeli editors who brought Etgar Keret to national attention met recently to reminisce for the record about their brief but memorable association with him. Hannan Hever and Moshe Ron had a history of collaboration on various editorial and writing ventures going back to the early 1980s. By 1991,…...read more »

The two of us met during a particularly gritty winter in our first year of graduate school at Brown University. While Chana, an Israeli fiction writer, translator and scholar had just begun working on her PhD in Israeli and Palestinian Comparative Literature, I was completing my MFA in Fiction at the…...read more »

A few years ago, in a seminar I took on contemporary Palestinian literature, the professor gave us a homework assignment to draw a map of Israel and Palestine. I remember finding it a bit comical, the idea of a bunch of graduate students going home, digging up some crayons or markers, and clumsily…...read more »

As Chana and I have begun to examine the literary and publishing trends in Israel and the Palestinian territories in light of the shifting political situation in the region, I’ve found myself thinking back to a recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, titled: “William…...read more »

Within two minutes of meeting the Israeli Arab writer Sayed Kashua, I realize that the questions I have prepared—about identity, and intifadas—are far too serious. In his first two novels (Dancing Arabs, Grove Press, 2004; and Let It Be Morning, Grove Press, 2006), Kashua uses stark, sometimes…...read more »

Translated from the Hebrew by Chana Morgenstern. Almog Behar Is a Mizrahi (Jew of Arab descent) writer, literary critic and activist involved in the solidarity movement against the eviction of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem. Behar is also actively engaged in a small but vibrant…...read more »

Translated from the Hebrew by Chana Morgenstern In this installment of "Artists Talk: Israel/Palestine," Chana Morgenstern. speaks to Almog Behar, whose poem, Sheikh Jarrah, 2010" you can read over here. Chana Morgenstern: Can you tell me a little bit about how your experiences organizing with…...read more »

This poem is dedicated to my friend and colleague Juliano Mer Khamis, born in Nazareth in 1958 and Artistic Director of the Jenin Freedom Theater. He was tragically shot by unknown assailants in Jenin yesterday as he was leaving the theater. His two-year-old son was in the car with him. Juliano was the…...read more »

In her latest dispatch for our Artists Talk: Israel/Palestine series, Azareen Van der Vliet speaks to Raji Bathish, a Palestinian poet, novelist, screenplay writer and cultural activist born in Nazareth. Bathish’s work has been widely published across the Arab and Israeli-Palestinian worlds. He…...read more »